Photoessay #2080 - One thing leads to another

One thing that I find very satisfying with my current is how one thing leads to another.  I continue with my self-directed academic activities.  I won't go into why it's so inevitably self-directed; I'll just use age as an excuse.

When I started started thinking about writing about my great great grandfather Maier Zunder, I immediately thought of the Zunder family scrapbooks held by Jewish Historical Society of New Haven.  I had first seen them in 1974.  The paper required by my geneaology certificate program gave me a dandy excuse.  I went to New Haven November 2011 and my cousin and I went to work.

So I started there:

They had some great content, newspaper clippings and ephemwera. They gave me ome real specific directions about his public life.  M Zunder & Sons, the Board of Education, the Horeb Lodge.  I also had my own notes from my interviews in the 1970s.  So I started looking at other sources to build a paper about Maier Zunder's life resulting in writing the paper for the class. "Maier Zunder: A Leading Citizen of Nineteenth Century New Haven."  I had it printed up and handed it out.  A slightly abridged version will appear in the Research Bulletin of the Seattle Genealogical Society in the next two issues.

I found one story that was so compelling, it just needed it's own paper.  I convinced my professor to let me write two papers.  That paper will (supposedly) be appearing in this issue of the academic peer-reviewed journal Connecticut History.  I haven't seen it yet.  I sure hope it's coming because I have bragged non-stop about it. "Prayer in the Schools: The 1877-8 Devotional Exercise in New Haven.

It started with the scrapbooks, certainly intersected with his life course plus I used a lot of primary newspaper sources to write it.   One compelling reason was that, as far as I could tell, nobody had written about it as a piece.  Now, to my delight, I've discovered that there is another paper about it, written by a Yale student for her senior thesis in 2000.  I've located the author and I hope she will send me a copy.

I returned to New Haven in October (before the hurricane).  I was unsure of my direction.  In the course of the week, I found a hand-written promissory note in the Mishkan Israel's files at the New Haven Historical Society (the Colony) in Maier's own hand.  As I reflected, I realized that this handwriting matched that in the early scrapbooks, the part about Maier himself.  I realized that he kept the scrapbooks himself.

Wow, that brought me right back.  I knew exactly what I wanted to write about.  Maier Zunder's Scrapbook.  But I realized it the evening before I left New Haven for Boston.  I can reconstruct a lot of it from what I have.  But I need to look at the document in a whole new way.  Now I'm looking for form rather than content.  I need to go back and get some good images (I've signed up Charlie, my brother.)

But when???  What's standing in my way the most is WINTER.  Charl is traveling in November, I really can't disrupt my cousin in December.  Which brings us to January.  I want to go in January but my cousin counsels me that the weather can be extreme.  She goes to Florida the whole month of February.  That brings us to March.  Aaack, I don't want to wait until March.  But I might have to do that.

I drew the charts (how could you guess).  Kind of like Flash's style but not in the same ballpark.  Maybe in the same universe.